Monday, January 19, 2009

Changed Life Stories :: San Diego

One of Student Venture’s crucial evangelistic strategies is conferences. Each January across the country, Student Venture holds Winter Conferences/FastBreaks to gather students for a “fast break” from their normal lives. At the conferences, the students benefit from Bible teaching, worship, and evangelism, plus fun and fellowship. Most importantly, God always works in the hearts of students to make Himself known to them.

Below is a report from one of those conferences. As the story states, the San Diego Conference was a combination of high school and college students. God is working through these partnerships, and we are excited to see Him fulfilling the partnership vision He gave us!

God is so creative in the ways He reaches down to us. Over the next few weeks, we look forward to sharing more of His ways with you, our Treasured Ministry Partners.SAN DIEGO WINTER CONFERENCEby Oscar and Candis Avalos, SV staff in Peoria, AZ

What do you get when you take 60 high school students, 650+ college students and a really cool city? Pure chaos, you say? Yes! But it was wonderful chaos which helped transform the lives of many students we work with during our time at the SDWC.

It was especially exciting because, for the first time, we did a conference with both college and high school students. Both parties were able to see each other worship the Lord and be inspired to live a life fully committed to Christ. It was also great for college students to catch the vision of reaching high school students and for high school students to see that being a college student doesn’t mean you ditch your faith, but can actually get excited about following Jesus.

One of the conference highlights were our “chat rooms”. Every night, after our main session, our students would break up into small groups and discuss what they were learning. It was so exciting to hear from guys who, just 3 months ago, didn’t know who Jesus was or how to read the Bible, but are now excited about growing in their faith and about sharing it with others. That’s the kind of life-change we long to see, and it’s happening in powerful ways!